Wadeye school seeks compensation over "discrimination"

Published: 16 April 2007

Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School in Wadeye Aboriginal community,
south-west of Darwin, is seeking an apology and compensation for
alleged discrimination that has caused it to miss out on millions of
dollars in federal funding.

With
the help of Melbourne law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler, the Catholic-run
school is preparing an unprecedented complaint for the Human Rights and
Equal Opportunity Commission, The Age reports.

"All the
children [Our Lady of Sacred Heart school] in Wadeye are treated as
second-class citizens," says the school's deputy principal Ann Rebgetz.
.
"There
is a world here and there's a very different world out there. The kids
here are being denied the basic right to proper care and education."

The
school will claim that for up to 30 years children in remote indigenous
communities such as Wadeye have been discriminated against and denied
tens of millions of federal government dollars.

The complaint, which lawyers expect to file this week, will seek an apology and compensation.

Citing
the example of 12-year-old Bernadette Mullumbuk who was born without
arms as a result of a rare condition called tar syndrome, school
principal Tobias Ngambe says that Bernadette deserves "the very best,
like all the other disabled children in Australia".

Everyone at
the school is proud of Bernadette's achievements, even though she and
15 other disabled students do not receive the same specialised care as
most other disabled children in Australia.